Quilt a day #46

I have been distracted and haven't posted for a couple of days. Friday we went to our daughter Lisa's senior Engineering Design Expo at University of Idaho. Here she is at her booth with the clarinet reed maker she and her team made. She is a Bio Engineering major but there weren't any projects in her major and she had played clarinet in school so this is the project she ended up on. It's hard to believe my second child will be a college graduate in two weeks and her sister her graduated from college in 2008.I am working on a bunch of scrap projects and machine quilting. This is the quilt I am machine quilting for my friend Jo. I saw the June/July issue of Quilt magazine on the newstand and the cover quilt grabbed me. It was done in more Kaffe Fassett style fabrics, but I decided to make a smaller version in my state flowers fabrics. I had to improvise on a couple of them since I didn't have the full collection and I had gotten scraps from my friend Tamra. I had little dots on them to make sure I had one for every state. I had thrown them up on the wall but I am not sure why I am keeping up there, because I need to rearrange them anyway after sewing colors around each diamond.Last, here are a couple of "pin holders" a neighbor made me years ago when we still had the weekly hand quilting group here.

Quilt a day #31

Last night and this morning I pin basted a quilt belonging to Jo for quilting. I am excited to see a block I made in it!. Check out her blog post to see a picture of it, it's the first quilt. My block is the second block down in the middle, a potato surrounded by delectable mountain blocks.

I am going on a quilt retreat next Thursday and a year ago I made my Canyon Dance quilt top and I have decided to machine quilt it at this retreat. People like to watch me quilt on my regular machine (although I do have a Pfaff Grand Quilter now). I didn't have backing so today I got out a bunch of the fabrics/colors in the top and made a pieced backing as shown below. I just threw it up on my design wall to take a photo. The quilt top measures 94.5" X 104.5" so of course the backing is bigger. Yikes! That's going to be a monster to quilt! Here is a refresher on the quilt top.Here is the backing thrown up on my design wall and it's way too big. My design wall is 7'H X 8'W.Here is a finished quilt, MUCH smaller! The blocks are 4" or 4 1/2" high. I can't remember the occasion I made this but there was something going on at my guild and I just made my blocks smaller.